Re: [oll-user] Finally, the revised instructions - please review!

[Urs L. <ul...@op...>]

Hi,
sorry for picking this one out of the long context.
I just don't have time to enter the discussion but couldn't resist here

Am 29.01.2014 17:39, schrieb Marc Sabatella:
> On 1/29/2014 9:27 AM, Urs Liska wrote:
>> Am 29.01.2014 17:21, schrieb Marc Sabatella:
>>> Except of course, if there*are*  advantages to binary, nothing
>>> in these challenges is likely to expose it.
>> I can't imagine any advantage of a binary format.
>
> I was being charitable :-).  But no, there *could* be a few advantages,
> depending on one's priorities:
>
> 1) probably could be optimized to save/load faster

That's what I always thought to be the primary reason (maybe together 
with saving bytes in memory), but I don't really believe that's of any 
real relevance.

> 2) by creating a system in which the user would be effectively prevented
> from editing the file by hand, the developer has more control over the
> input, and can hence be more lax with error checking and the verbosity
> of error messages that are generated

OK, that might be true, and maybe of relevance for security-relevant 
stuff. So it might be a good idea to prevent a pilot from manually 
editing the sources for the landing sequence of a 747 ;-)
But I think having access to the file content is a real benefit when 
dealing with _documents_. Being able to version, to process by a script,
to edit online etc....

> 3) the opaque-ness of the format could be an advantage if one wants to
> protect it as proprietary

Now _that's_ probably the reason that is most worthwile if you want to 
create a file format. But while not being a Free Software fundamentalist 
I'd actually "reject that out of hand".

Just yesterday I heard that German research funders (Deutsche 
Forschungsgemeinschaft) will _only_ fund research projects in the area 
of digital edition (music or text) that make their results (content and 
software) available as open source - simply because the risk is too high 
to loose the valuable information in opaque files and non-open software.

Urs

>
> Of course, #1 is probably inconsequential in practice, #2 is really just
> an excuse for laziness (and arguably counterproductive in the long run -
> as a developer, I *like* that I can examine and edit these files), and
> most in the open source world would reject #3 out of hand.
>
> Marc
>
>
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